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Miles Kington: All in the line of duty for the toon army

'This isn't a plug for a friend, it's a plug for an ancient British art as honourable as glass-blowing'

Tuesday 02 October 2001 00:00 BST
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The cartoonist Stan McMurtry ("Mac" of the Daily Mail) was on the Radio 4 programme Loose Ends a year ago talking about the art of cartooning and saying that, for no apparent reason, some cartoons stuck in your mind for years, even when you couldn't remember who had drawn them.

As an example, he mentioned a cartoon he had seen in Punch showing a guillotine scene from the French Revolution. A beheading had just taken place, and the executioner was holding up, for the crowd to see, a freshly severed man's head, ghastly and leering. One of the old women sitting round the scaffold says to a friend: "It's been years since a man looked at me like that!".

Everyone in the studio roared with laughter and so did I at home, which must have been gratifying for the cartoonist if he happened to be listening, as it isn't often you hear someone telling a cartoon successfully. Indeed, there are one or two Punch cartoons by McMurtry himself that I remember with equal affection many years on.

One of these is a drawing of a spaceship that has just landed on some urban site on Earth and disgorged two very metallic robots; one of the clanking robots has wandered into an adjacent amusement arcade and pulled the lever of a one-armed bandit, thereby, somewhat to his surprise, winning the jackpot and causing a cascade of coins.

"I just shook his hand and he was sick all over me!" the bemused robot exclaims to his colleague.

There's nothing quite like the momentary shock you get from a good cartoon. The sad thing is that nowadays the art of cartooning may gradually be fading away – the art of the single-drawing cartoon, that is. The animated cartoon is alive all right (indeed, the word "cartoon" to a young person probably means something that appears on the Cartoon Channel, a Tom and Jerry or a Simpsons, and not a cartoon in the old sense at all) but there are fewer and fewer places where real cartoonists can sell their wares, which means, I suppose, that there are going to be fewer and fewer artists tempted to try their luck at cartooning. And that means, I also suppose, that there won't be any more artists who come up through the ranks, starting as cartoonists and going on to be artists in their own right, as Steadman, Scarfe, Sempe and Searle all did. Offhand, the only cartoonist I can think of who is a household name among all ages is Gary Larson, and his "The Far Side" series.

Still, there are a few of the old masters left, such as Larry and Heath, and I am glad to see that one of them is having a volume of his work published this week by Methuen. Maclachlan is the man I mean, another artist whose cartoons I can remember years after they first appeared.

There is one of a man walking a dog that has just dug up a tiny bone, and the man is calling to him crossly to drop it and come on. What neither of them can see is is what Maclachlan has drawn underground, revealing that the bone is the final end tail bone of a huge buried dinosaur. Another cartoon is of another man with dog, this time sitting watching the sunset. The last tip of the sun goes down, down, until it vanishes and the man walks away with his dog – and as soon as they are gone, the sun reappears slightly. To take a bow? To cock a snook? You don't know. All I know is that it is funny.

Occasionally I am stirred to buy cartoon originals, and for the last year I have been the proud owner of a couple of Maclachlan drawings that now hang framed in the place where I work. One shows a scene in Hell where devils are gleefully pushing newly arrived sinners around with forks; one of the sinners has a mobile phone and is saying into it: "Hi – it's me – I'm just ringing to say I won't be home on the 6.10." The other, one of my favourites, shows a man talking over the garden fence to his neighbour, and saying "Look, Johnson, it's not your dog's barking I object to...", which is not funny until you look into the other garden and see the dog sitting behind a big drum kit which he is expertly thrashing away at with drumsticks.

Those cartoons are not actually in the book, but those that have been included are equally good, and mostly new to me. This isn't a plug for a friend, by the way, as I hardly know the man – it's a plug for an ancient British art as honourable as glass-blowing or real-ale brewing. I'm glad that there are people like Methuen who are still brave enough to put out a whole book of cartoons.

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